When I first used Cortana as part of Windows 10 I was quite disappointed when I found out it lacked quick commands like this. Sure it has some understanding of what is written such as "remind me to call Jim at 2pm" but it is very limited.
I was hoping I would be able to things like the following -
* backup Fizz Buzz project (and have it intelligently backup the Fizz Buss Visual Studio project to a default location)
* open Fizz Buzz issue 131 (and have it open a browser to the github issue tracker to the correct issue #)
* email the Fizz Buzz project plan to Jim (you can *kind of* do this but it hardly ever works as you would want)
* open Fizz Buzz todo.txt when I next login
* copy the Fizz Buzz project plan to my Dropbox projects folder
You know things that I will otherwise need to open the command prompt for or do some mundane UI task. Sure some of these things will require applications have such support but from what I can tell Cortana offers no real way to do this other than integrating with the Windows search service.
Considering most (all?) of these things could be done with PowerShell cmdlets it is annoying there is no way to script Cortana via PowerShell in such a way.
A lot of those things seem like commands specific to your environment though (read: things someone would have to develop out). Does Cortana offer some sort of API allowing you to add additional "commands" that she understands? That would be pretty neat.
I checked a few months ago but there was nothing specifically for desktop apps only universal ones and even then they were mostly voice-oriented things so you can "plug in to Bing". Ugh.
As far as I can tell it is not [yet?] possible to integrate features from a classic Win32 application into Cortana to do things like I listed. Shame as that would have been very cool.
My examples are very specific to my domain for sure but they were just some examples for my use, the general concept of using Cortana as an actual digital assistant to automate/speedup boring and often done tasks.
Cortana does do simple calculations though. Even things like 'is X prime?' work. So I am hopeful that there is indeed an API that they plan to release in the future.
The biggest issue is that to use Cortana you need to use an MS account and have an active internet connection even to do simple things like your example :(
I was hoping I would be able to things like the following -
You know things that I will otherwise need to open the command prompt for or do some mundane UI task. Sure some of these things will require applications have such support but from what I can tell Cortana offers no real way to do this other than integrating with the Windows search service.Considering most (all?) of these things could be done with PowerShell cmdlets it is annoying there is no way to script Cortana via PowerShell in such a way.
Maybe one day.